In-jury.

Isn’t it interesting that there is a jury in “injury”, and the jury is inside you?

I read somewhere that the “ego” or “personality” develops as a response to early life experiences, and when there is trauma, the whole substructure becomes a defense mechanism to that unreconciled trauma.

The inner jury also has to do with judgment— the trauma-informed judgment misses the mark on what is really going on, or the active creative potential in a relationship or situation and instead might resort to acting out the sense of injury and projecting that onto relationships. Taking offense and defense are polarizations of the injured ego-personality.

So how can you step out of this polarized world view and the pain it causes you? People turn to drugs, alcohol, as a way to self-medicate pain but until you can reconcile the trauma from the past and have a different relationship to it, its very difficult to heal these patterns. Here is where a guided entheogenic experience can breakthrough what no amount of talk therapy can do— awaken your perhaps long-forgotten sense of wholeness and joy, but also awaken the higher compassion necessary to forgive— both yourself and the perpetrator of the trauma.

I know from personal experience that even after a breakthrough with breathwork or ayahuasca or psilocybin or ibogaine, healing and reconciling deep injuries and traumas can take years, and it’s often a process of reconciliation again and again, this is what they call “integration” in the psychedelic lexicon. But it’s well worth the effort because the personality that emerges when you are free of that projection from the past and have healed your wounds is stronger, brighter, clearer, and you can sustain feelings of serenity, joy, and creativity without having to self-medicate.